Truck Scale Inspection
Hello All,
We receive organic and conventional corn and wheat and weigh the trucks that deliver the product on a truck scale. It is a brand new scale (1 month old), it only sees about 30 trucks per day. At the moment, we have a scale technician coming out quarterly to run accuracy checks and calibrations on it (dates back to the older scale that was just replaced as well). It has never been out of calibration. I'm curious about some of the insight that you guys may have on inspection frequency in this area.
Also, I've been reading some documents from the NIST, specifically handbook 44 and 155. I cannot find any laws concerning frequency of scale inspections. I understand that this may also be a state mandated issue, so I checked into Ohio codes and also the Department of Commerce website. I can't find any laws or codes concerning testing frequencies. There has to be something, right? Can someone help me with this please? I just want some sort of code to refer to when writing my scale calibration procedure for my SQF plan.
Thanks in advance for your help!
Hope that helps.
Hi dwells,
Assuming there is no Statutory requirement, you might consider yr OP from an alternative POV.
What do you (retrospectively) plan to do if yr Calibration Interval of X Months eventually finds that the scale is out of calibration ?
(This is an "answer" commonly posed for metal detector "Calibrations")
What level SQF Certification are you looking at? There would be no safety issues for level 2. Level 3...maybe test weight? Point being the usage of your scale is going to be the important part. As Charles said, what do you do if its out of calibration for x months. You could have a truck get weighed on a state certified CAT scale or something similar once a week or month in between those service intervals. You could also take something of known weight and put it on the scales. All of those could help you...but I would look in to whether or not you actually need to have the scale calibration procedure in your SQF program. Maybe its just an internal procedure.
We handle similar products and Montana requires that our scales be certified every year. We do daily internal scale checks with 500# of NIST weights so that if an issue comes up with the scale we know right away and call our scale certifying company to come fix it.